Thurber’s needlegrass (Achnatherum thurberianum [Piper] Barkworth) is an important component of many sagebrush communities in the Intermountain West. Prescribed fall burning is often implemented in sagebrush plant communities to mimic historic wildfires, improve wildlife habitat, and increase livestock forage production. Burning is used because it shifts dominance from sagebrush to herbaceous v...

Global change poses significant challenges for ecosystem conservation. At regional scales, climate change may lead to extensive shifts in species distributions and widespread extirpations or extinctions. At landscape scales, land use and invasive species disrupt ecosystem function and reduce species richness. However, a lack of spatially explicit models of risk to ecosystems makes it difficult ...

0022-1694/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2012.07.008 ⇑ Corresponding author. Present address: 302 Walk State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. Tel.: 863 7943. E-mail address: [email protected] (K.J. Naithani). Arid and semi-arid ecosystems represent a dynamic but poorly understood component of global carbon, water, and energy cycles. We stud...

Animal habitat selection is a process that functions at multiple, hierarchically. structured spatial scales. Thus multi-scale analyses should be the basis for inferences about factors driving the habitat selection process. Vertebrate herbivores forage selectively on the basis of phytochemistry, but few studies have investigated the influence of selective foraging (i.e., fine-scale habitat selec...

Recovery of the soil microbial community after fire in a sagebrush-grassland ecosystem was examined using a chronosequence of four sites ranging in time since fire from 3–39 years. The successional stage communities examined included Recent Burn (3 years since fire, ysf), Establishment (7 ysf), Expansion (21 ysf), and Mature (39 ysf). Aboveground standing plant biomass increased with time since...

Climate change may represent the greatest future risk to the sagebrush ecosystem. Improved ways to quantify and monitor gradual change resulting from climate influences in this ecosystem are vital to its future management. For this research, the change over time of five continuous field cover components including bare ground, herbaceous, litter, sagebrush, and shrub were measured on the ground ...

Prescribed fire in rangeland ecosystems is applied for a variety of management objectives, including enhancing productivity of forage species for domestic livestock. In the big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) steppe of the western United States, fire has been a natural and prescribed disturbance, temporarily shifting vegetation from shrub–grass codominance to grass dominance. There is li...

Shifts in plant species phenology (the timing of life-history events such as flowering) have been observed worldwide in concert with rising global temperatures. While most species display earlier phenology with warming, there is large variation among, and even within, species in phenological sensitivity to rising temperatures. Other indirect effects of climate change, such as shifting species c...

Plant population models are powerful tools for predicting climate change impacts in one location, but are difficult to apply at landscape scales. We overcome this limitation by taking advantage of two recent advances: remotely sensed, speciesspecific estimates of plant cover and statistical models developed for spatiotemporal dynamics of animal populations. Using computationally efficient model...

Plant population models are powerful tools for predicting climate change impacts in one location, but are difficult to apply at landscape scales. We overcome this limitation by taking advantage of two recent advances: remotely sensed, speciesspecific estimates of plant cover and statistical models developed for spatiotemporal dynamics of animal populations. Using computationally efficient model...